


Murmuration

by spoke



Category: Glitch (Video Game)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-19
Updated: 2015-12-19
Packaged: 2018-05-07 13:37:10
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,250
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5458364
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spoke/pseuds/spoke
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff"><p>You might be able to guess, I kind of love the Rook. One of my biggest disappointments was that we never learned more about them while the game lasted.</p></blockquote>





	Murmuration

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Cloudtrader](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cloudtrader/gifts).



They exist as fragments of pain, momentary darknesses shrugged off. From the first they have no place. Turned away from the world, walled off from the shelter and solace and _substance_ of the Giants’ dreaming, they can hardly be said to exist. Yet having been imagined, even as whispers, they are there.

They gather to watch the rise and fall of the dreaming, to best know where to strike. They see the empty places, things not quite imagined yet, and learn to dive into them, twisting as they do, becoming again those fragments of thoughts from which they first took being.

A number of the flock come to wonder if the Glitchen did not come into being as an answer to their own existence. They seem too perfectly fitted to the world, even as they expand it and shape it in ways that none of the Giants imagined.

 

They are the nightmare of thoughts weighed down with grief, of gases so heavy they _sink_ rather than rise. They are skies bogged down with clouds, beaks that hammer at the walls of dreaming, feathers that put the night to shame. They are mastery and direction to what would have remained aimless, gravity in a world without. _amsoC_

They are light in all the ways that Rook are not, even without wings. They are tied to the ground as Rook will never be, and yet they soar, through the clouds and even beneath the sea, in ways that defy explaining.

 

They are night lightless and barren, the death of stars and voices both. There is no friendship in them, so the thought says, only selfishness without revelry. Yet there is a joy in the flocking, in the many-winged prescence required to push through the Giants’ defenses and attack. It is a joy that cannot be found alone, and close enough to friendship. _yldneirF_

They are camaraderie without any purpose but itself, the night full of stars and laughter and music. They are sly smiles and companionship in ways that Rook cannot recognize, that leave even nightmares incarnate recoiling from a heat and togetherness so alien to their natures as to hurt.

 

They are betrayal, loss, the fear of being turned away. Forgotten almost in the moment of their imagining, yet they cannot be unthought. They are self-recrimination, the fear that attempting to unthink them gave them the power to destroy. Yet they know in the hollow void of their bones that it is not so, that destruction was at the core of their being. There is no acceptance that could have changed their nature. _eniladnerG, hplA_

They are loyalty, fierce and unwavering, drawn to each other and to the world in ways that seems to warn them of the flock’s arrival every time. They are a riot of color and difference that still manages to drive the unity that is Rook away, with a light different from and yet kin to the heat that the night’s Giant brings out in them.

 

They are rot and choking death, days of the sun never quite rising, nights robbed of their cooling relief. Unending heat spills from their wings, swirling disease and misery into Ur that never quite takes hold. A blight and wounding ever beaten back by the Glitchen and their Giants, yet ever returning. They are falling trees, the collapsing of caves, the undoing of the very foundations of the dream. Life is made sharper by the dying they bring, however temporary it may be. _elliZ, baM, naggirpS_

They are life, growth, plenty and more to go around, forever leaving things for each other where Rook hold, each fragment of the flock, to what they’ve found for themselves. They are planters and harvesters, tending to everything Rook touch and more, forever spreading growth and marveling at the way the world responds to them.

 

They are the screams of chickens and piggies, trees wailing for help, scattering helikitties. They are butterflies torn out of the sky, wailing gibberish from the ground so the air is free for other flights. They are pain in a world that was not meant to know it, loss in the midst of plenty, cruelty clawing into the shelter of the caring. They must care for their own, after all, and no amount of petting would be of use to a Rook. _ababmuH_

Caretakers, guardians, lovers of all that moves and that does not, but they seem to hold some special love for the things that crawl about in their own space. All of the squawking and oinking and purring that burn the ears of Rook seem to bring joy to them; hours on end wasted getting piggies to oink and chasing chickens that have clearly had enough.

 

They are unending starvation, the withering of the bounty of a world that should never have known an end. They are gardens untended, returning to the land so that none might know where the planting used to be done. They are food rotting in the pot, fruit falling unchanged from the trees to waste upon the ground, chefs forgetting why they even cared to cook. _toP_

They are life turned back on itself, so that everything that falls from pig and chicken and butterfly feeds them, becoming ever more complicated renditions of the stuff of imagination. One fruit wasn’t bad enough, there have to be more and more, with no telling where it might end or if it ever will. Lemons of all things! And purple, as if touching on the edges of insanity were a game to play to the children of joy.

 

They are incalculable chaos, something that cannot quite be adjusted for properly. They are the upset of theory and number, a madness that warps the proper pattern of things, a number that defies calculation. They do not need it, or want it - they are their own understanding. _iiT_

 Calculation, order and understanding. The terrible compassion of minds that will continue to measure everything, to judge and adjust and maintain the fabric of imagination in ways that most of them seem not realize might be needed. Terrible little thieves of chaos, chipping away at uncertainty number by number, closing in the gaps.

 

They are lost, and losing; a place that has not been found and never will be. They are heights that cannot be scaled and depths that cannot be plumbed, and yet. Yet. Here were whispers of a way. Strung through the air like promises, they lead through the emptiness to a wood like an echo of the woods they hated; but dark and comforting and carved of voidstuff. There are shadows not cast by the light of any hateful sun, and mist that doesn’t need water to rise; and if sometimes the Glitchen find a way through, and an egg or two is lost, what of that.

Anything is better than nothing, and even despair should have a place to call home. _meL_

The joy and excitement of finding themselves in a new place, however unlike their own land it might be. This more than anything makes the Glitchen a weapon and a threat. Not the lost eggs, for any number of Rook might be replaced; but the love of what is alien, so that in time even some places of their own land have taken on a touch of all that should belong to Rook. Yet still they love those places that are alien, distant, dark; and these things come into the Giants’ fold by it.

**Author's Note:**

> You might be able to guess, I kind of love the Rook. One of my biggest disappointments was that we never learned more about them while the game lasted.


End file.
